Simon Coter, Principal Product Manager Oracle VM and VirtualBox, has announced the release of the third Beta build of the upcoming VirtualBox 5.1 open-source and cross-platform virtualization software.
VirtualBox 5.1 promises to be a major release that will introduce a significant number of new features and improvements, among which we can mention a revamped installer based on the latest Qt5 technologies, and the ability to rebuild kernel modules without the Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) framework.
A great number of performance improvements are also coming to VirtualBox 5.1 thanks to the implementation of new APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) and I/O APIC technologies. And it also looks like the upcoming release sports multiple enhancements to Solaris operating systems.
The third Beta of VirtualBox 5.1 comes hot on the heels of VirtualBox 5.0.22, which introduced initial support for the upcoming Linux 4.7 kernel, as well as some much-needed fixes to Linux and Windows hosts, as well as Windows Additions and Linux Additions, but also X.Org Server 1.18 support to Solaris Additions.
What’s new in VirtualBox 5.1 Beta 3
VirtualBox 5.1 Beta 3 is, as expected, all about fixes, and looking at the changelog, we can notice better support for running a 64-bit Solaris operating system on 32-bit machines, multiple I/O-APIC fixes and improvements, small Mac OS X and Paravirt fixes, and some GUI enhancements like host-screen reattaching and layout change.
The support for Windows XP guests has been improved as well to default to E1000 (PRO/1000 T Server), which promises much better performance. For Linux users, VirtualBox 5.1 Beta 3 fixes some issues with the latest Qt5 GUI toolkit, thus improving the use of the .run installer on newer GNU/Linux distributions.
Ultimately, VirtualBox 5.1 Beta 3 adds better battery information for guest OSes, E1000 performance improvements by implementing interrupt throttling, a fix for the drag and drop service to no longer be blocked for one minute during shutdown of a VM, and raises the RAM and VRAM values, along with the disk size for various guests.
For the full list of changes, please check out the release notes attached at the end of the article. In the meantime, you can download VirtualBox 5.1 Beta 3 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now via our website and take it for a test drive. Please note that this is Beta-quality software, not to be used in production environments.
Via Softpedia